The last set of certs I did was around 2010. They were the six certs required to be a Microsoft Certified Architect (?). I was transistioning from a decade of C bit twiddling with some VB6 on the side to becoming an “Enterprise Developer” and had just gotten a job where they were transitioning to from a VB/C++ backend to .Net.

My thought process for the certifications were the same - a method to get on an organized learning path. But, by the time the company folded two years later, the certs had already expired and I never bothered getting them renewed. I knew it wouldn’t matter when looking for my next job. So they have never appeared on my resume.

Looking back, I don’t think that the AWS Associate certs were any better or worse than the Microsoft certs. But I will keep these up to date.

The second part of the story is that after seeing how much these “certified consultants” were making - I was the dev lead after all - I realized where the money was. Especially since I already had a long development background and some Devops experience I could be much better at AWS consulting than some infrastructure guys.

When I changed companies, I negotiated not to be a team lead. I wanted to be an IC to fill in some technical gaps and get hands on experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant moving companies up on the cloud maturity model”.